THE HAND OF AI

BY JAMES THOMPSON

Kallio

I rest my feet on Mama. I don’t feel much, but when I stretch out in my leather wingback chair with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and put my feet up on Mama, I feel a touch of satisfaction. She was sick, very sick and for a very long time, and I made her wel.

I light one Marlboro off another and stub out the last in the ashtray on the stand at the left side of my wingback throne. My lungs wheeze and I cough like I have tuberculosis plus asthma from my three-pack-a-day habit, but it doesn’t concern me. My dead hand stays cold, has almost no blood flow. Sooner or later, gangrene will set in and blood poisoning may come with it. Depending on whether it’s wet or dry gangrene, they’ll want to take it.

My hand may be dead, twisted and gnarled, scarred; it may sicken people to look at, but it’s mine, and I’m keeping it or going out with it.

It happened on the day after my fourth birthday. My birthday present was a bomber-style down jacket. The collar turned up and it was thick and fluffy, but tight at the waist. I suffered from malnutrition—my bones jutted out and my stomach was distended. Mama wasn’t much interested in eating and I suppose she thought I wasn’t either. I knew being so skinny made me look gruesome and ugly, and I thought the jacket helped hide that. I was proud of it.

I still look gruesome and ugly. My dead hand revolts people. I’ve made it worse. I put out cigarettes on it to make people think I’m tough. I don’t feel the burn, but after using my parlor trick hundreds of times, the already disgusting hand is now just a deformed lump of scar tissue and scabs. The sight and smell of the cigarette burns, and the fact that I don’t even flinch when I do it, causes an attitude adjustment when I sense that people are considering fucking with me.

Aside from my hand, I never recovered from malnutrition, and I’m paper thin and my face is scarred from beatings, both from Mama and bullies; I’m so weak that I feel as if I’m made of bubble wrap and Styrofoam instead of flesh and blood.

My hand got ruined on the day after my birthday. Mama had been sweet, even made me a birthday cake, but she was about as predictable as a heart attack—she didn’t feel well because she hadn’t taken her medicine, and she was getting angry with me.

She taught me to play a game. She taught me that men in stores in uniforms were playing the game too. We didn’t know them, but we knew they were playing. The object of the game was to go to stores and get treats and goodies. If we got out unnoticed, we won the game, but it we were seen, we would lose and the men would be mean and take us to bad places.

Mama didn’t work. She was on permanent disability because of her illness, and her medicine cost almost all her money, like injecting liquid cash into a hole in her arm, so I liked the game, even if it was scary, because we always had something good to eat after we won. If we didn’t play, sometimes dinner, if she bothered at all, was soup made out of ketchup and hot water.

Mama gave me my nice jacket to help me play the game. One time she wrote, naudan sisäfilet—beef inner filet—on the palm of my hand. I couldn’t read or write, of course, but all I had to do was match the letters on the palm of my hand with the writing on the package, then slip the meat inside my coat.

The man in the uniform passed by me; I was afraid to lose the game and afraid of him and afraid of Mama, my palms got sweaty and the writing blurred. Sisä turned into a smudge and I got something called naudan ulkofilet—beef outer filet.

When we left the store and walked away from it, I gave her the beef, and she turned furious. Ulkofilet isn’t as tender as sisäfilet. Her boyfriend—she had a lot of boyfriends, and when she didn’t have one, I would watch out the window as she walked up and down Flemari, getting into cars. When she came home, her hair was a mess and her lipstick smeared all over her face. Say what you want about Mama, even though she was sick, she was pretty.

Her boyfriend was coming and bringing her medicine, and she was making him a nice meal. Beef and mashed potatoes. She was pounding the ulkofilet with a meat hammer to tenderize it. A pot of water was boiling, waiting for the potatoes. My cake from the day before was on the counter near her. I reached up and took a slice. I thought it would be all right. It was my cake.

Mama went crazy. She grabbed my wrist and the cake fell back onto the plate. She forced my left hand flat onto the counter and started smashing it with the wooden meat hammer. I felt bones crackle and pop. I started screaming in pain: Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai! This further enraged her, she flipped the hammer and kept smashing my fingers and hand with the pyramid-shaped spikes on the back of it. Bones snapped and blood flew. I shrieked and cried and kept screaming, Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai! I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even form words to beg her to stop. I bawled and shrieked at the top of my lungs. She kept my hand pinned to the counter and wouldn’t stop hitting it. She told me to shut up and quit my crying or she would give me something to cry about.

I couldn’t stop. My hand didn’t look like a hand anymore. It looked like a tiny piece of the ulkofilet, just bloody red meat, thoroughly tenderized. In some kind of dope-sick twisted logic, to stop my crying, she jammed my hand and arm almost up to my elbow in the boiling potato water. I’ve never, before or since, experienced anything approaching that agony, but in a way, it was a kindness. I blacked out.

I woke up in darkness, folded into the cramped space of the bedroom closet. Mama said she didn’t like me to see her take her medicine, and that her boyfriends weren’t interested in children. She always jammed a chair under the outside handle to make sure I stayed put. She expected me to stay silent, to give no clue that I was there.

It was cool and quiet in the closet and I didn’t mind, except for the times she forgot I was there and left the apartment. Then, I measured time by when light peeked into the thin space below the door. Except in winter, when there was no light. Then, life was timeless. Mama’s medicine usually made her pass out or at least left her on the nod, and I could usually count on spending the night there.

When I woke, I tried to be quiet, but the pain was so awful that I couldn’t stop mewling. She must not have wanted to make a scene in front of her boyfriend, so the first time, she tried to gag me quiet by taping my mouth shut, but they could still hear me. The second time, she gave me a pill. It was a blessing. I slept for a long time.

I woke up when Uncle Jukka opened the door and lifted me up in his arms, like he would a baby. He carried me to the couch and laid me down. The boyfriend was gone, but the evidence of medicine was on the coffee table: a scorched spoon, white dust, syringes, and needles. He didn’t say a word to Mama, just started slapping the shit out of her. Before, I would have thrown myself on him to try to protect her. But at that moment, my own pain was of more concern than hers and I didn’t care. Agony killed my emotions. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about her, I just couldn’t care about anything at all. Watching her take a beating sparked nothing in me.

Jukka carried me to his car and took me home. He and his wife Anni had a powwow: what to do with me and Mama. I could hear them talking. Jukka always stopped by our apartment a couple times a week. I thought it was because he liked Mama, but it wasn’t. He came to make sure nothing like this had happened to me. He called Mama a “filthy-piece-of-shit junkie whore.” Mama used those words a lot. I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant, but I knew it was something bad.

The options. Call child services, have me taken away from her; but Mama would be in terrible trouble too. Keep me here until I healed, and tell Mama that if she didn’t become a good mother, and now, they would see that she was punished for hurting me. They chose the second option. Jukka couldn’t stand putting his sister in jail. She would get one more chance.

* * *

They said the hand was ruined. No amount of surgery would correct it. More than likely, it would be amputated. They needed to invent a story. I didn’t know the word amputate. Jukka explained. I screamed, cried, and begged. Finally, he relented, provided that as it healed, it didn’t start rotting and endanger my life. Strange that I understood so little of this but remember so much of it. Every last word.

Since a doctor couldn’t become involved, as certainly the police would become involved too, they slathered my arm and hand with burn ointment, wrapped them in gauze and bandages, and hoped for the best. And the best that could be hoped for, given the devastation heaped upon me, is what I got. One day, Jukka changed my bandages, and a thick layer of dead skin was loose. It peeled away like a long and thin white glove a woman might wear to a night of ballroom dancing. Muscles were visible in spots, under the blood, scabs, and dreck.

Neither of us said anything. Jukka just wrapped it up again. I healed over time, even though the result was a horror show. Probably because I was so young, the hand adapted to its devastation and didn’t putrify, just atrophied into a useless, twisted, and mangled mess.

For a time, I stayed with Jukka and Anni and their two boys, both a few years older than me. Jukka was big and had a reputation for being mean and he drank a lot. He had no compunctions about backhanding his boys or even Anni, but he never hit me. He was good to me.

After about a month, Jukka talked to me. Mama was coming to take me home. He pressed twenty euros into my good hand and told me it was secret emergency money. There were lots of little kiosks around our apartment on Flemari. He told me to hide it and use it to eat if Mama didn’t feed me. He said he was going to visit often, and we would have secret talks, and I was to tell him if something bad happened to me again.

Mama showed up, medicated, and he told her to explain herself and to tell him exactly what she had done. They sat at the kitchen table and the medicine made her giggle while she told him the scripture pure truth. When she got to the part about me screaming Ai! over and over again, she started laughing and couldn’t stop. Jukka just sipped coffee and stared at her.

Over the years, naturally enough, her boyfriends and fellow medicants asked her what had happened to me. She would tell the story like it was nothing and laugh her way through it. And Ai! made her laugh the hardest. Eventually, my real name was forgotten, everyone called me Ai, and so I remain.

When Mama was done and stopped laughing, Jukka laid down the law. She was never to hurt me again. She was never to lock me in the closet again. She was to see that I was fed and cared for. She was to treat me like a human being. Any infraction of these rules would be punished. He would heap whatever harm she caused me upon her tenfold. Then he would report her to the police. They would both go to jail: her for hurting me, him for hurting her. When they got out of jail, he would do to her exactly what she had done to me, and she could spend the rest of her life with a withered and deformed hand as well.

She laughed in his face. “Fuck you. You can’t tell me how to raise my kid.”

He swung his fist across the table and broke her nose. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

When she came back from the hospital after having her nose set, she took me home.

Everything changed. Mama was afraid of me now. My influence with Jukka gave me power over her. She dealt with it by ignoring me. I considered this a significant improvement in our relationship. She kept food in the house, which she mostly shoplifted herself. She whored when she had to.

I was still unhappy. Kids at school bullied and beat me. I was a soft target. I made a friend once, a boy who had been mauled by a dog. The stitches made his face look like a patchwork quilt, and he couldn’t cry because his tear ducts were gone. His companionship made things worse. Bullies got two for the price of one. We parted ways. He even started picking on me, thinking it would raise his status in the eyes of the bullies, and diminish their affection for beating him. He was wrong. They beat him worse. Those tear ducts would have come in handy.

* * *

I was about twelve when Mama met Jari, a midlevel drug dealer. Their relationship stuck. He more or less lived with us. Mama was happy. Jari kept her supplied with medicine. He used drugs too, but liked to go up, not down. Mama hadn’t worn too badly over time. Her teeth had fallen out and she wore dentures. Jari didn’t mind. He said she gave better head toothless.

Jari had intelligence and a sense of humor. He treated me with decency, even seemed to like me. He had the street smarts not to flash his cash and drove junk cars which he changed frequently. He ran a daily route and sold dope in the parks around Kallio, the district we lived in: Karhupuisto (Bear Park), the dog parks in Torkkelinmäki and Lintulahti, Vaasanaukio (often called Piritori), Speed Square, the little park down the street from it that bordered Aleksiskivenkatu, and a couple of other places. He changed his route schedule every couple weeks. Sometimes he took me with him after I got out of school.

I liked to go with him. It changed my status. Jari’s pride and joy was a Remington .12-gauge tactical shotgun. It looked like something from Star Wars. It was short, had pistol grips instead of a butt. Extra ammo hung off the left side and it had a magazine extension.

Jari taught me about guns, and I like technical things. I like to memorize things. TacStar offers a variety of tactical shotgun accessories for Mossberg Maverick 88, Remington 870, Benelli Nova as well as M1/M2, and Winchester 1300 shotguns. TacStar shotgun accessories allow the professional operator to personalize a tactical shotgun to meet specific mission needs. Adding the TacStar shotgun pistol grips reduces the overall size for close combat quarters, while the addition of the side saddle and magazine extension assure sufficient ammunition for any given circumstance. High-tech flashlights under the barrel and on the top allow it to be used in the dark and blind whoever you are going to kill with it.

Jari’s precautions—the shitbox cars and route changes, and his shotgun, which he said he kept because it caused a lot more fear than a pistol, and he was right—kept him from getting busted. Business thrived. He let me keep the Remington in my lap sometimes. A lot of the bullies liked drugs, and seeing me with Jari and that gun made them think twice before beating me. He tried to teach me to use it, but I wasn’t strong enough to cock it. The bullies didn’t know that. Life got better.

I looked up to Jari and thought he liked me. Often, he patted my knee or rested his hand on it while we were in the car, running his route. I even let myself think it a sort of fatherly affection.

I stayed away from people. I turned into a bookworm and read a whole book almost every day. I learned how to use computers at school and stole one at Rautatientori—the main railway station. One afternoon a guy in a suit had a few bags beside him, must have spent the day shopping. He was taking money from a cash machine while talking on the phone, attention diverted. I was a habitual thief, had stolen almost everything I owned. After a lifetime of practice, I was expert at it. One big bag was from Verkkokauppa, the mega-IT store. I could read Apple on a box at the top of the bag. I picked up the bag and strolled off to an Internet café just a few minutes away.

Jackpot. The receipt was in the bag. He had bought a Mac computer and paid cash for it one hour and twenty-seven minutes earlier. He hadn’t filled out the registration or warrantee yet. I filled out the forms right then and there. It was a gamble. The guy I boosted it from could report it to Verkkokauppa, Apple could eventually trace it through the internal registration code. I banked on him being too lazy—took the chance that he would just try to get insurance to pay for it and forget about it. Maybe even think he lost it.

But for now, it was mine. If any questions came up, I would dump it and steal another. I couldn’t envision the police getting a search warrant and raiding our apartment over one lousy computer. I took it home, plugged it in, and immediately found an unprotected Wi-Fi connection. The Internet was my oyster. I began envisioning all the cool games I would shoplift. I won the bet. There were no questions. I could keep the computer.

It was summer. The sun felt good, even just beaming through the windows. Now, looking back over my sixteen years, it was the best time of my life. I was no longer beaten up. I had discovered books and lived vicariously through them. I had a computer, and soon learned the joys of social networking, mostly on literary sites, like Goodreads. People online couldn’t see me for the ugly, misshapen creature I was. Jukka still visited us on a regular basis. Since Mama had Jari, she kept food in the house. When Jukka and Anni bought new clothes for their own boys, they bought for me too. Jukka gave me twenty euros a week.

* * *

I was fourteen when the world came crashing down again. Jari came home drunk one Monday evening. He and Mama sat on the couch, both toasted on their drugs of choice, watching a porn film. It was one of Jari’s favorites, Fuck Her in the Ass IV. I walked by, on the way to my bedroom. Mama still didn’t care for my presence, and although she no longer locked me in the closet, she made it clear that I was to make myself scarce when Jari was there. She didn’t like me. Never had. Never would.

Jari opened a beer bottle with his teeth. I walked past him. He leaned forward and grabbed my butt. “You know, Ai, you got a sweet little ass. We slap some lipstick on you, you’ll be prettier than your mama. Too bad you still got your teeth though.”

He yucked and elbowed Mama in the ribs. He expected us to laugh at his joke. It all came reeling in a lightning flash of understanding. The hand brushing my leg or resting on my knee. The occasional unexpected drunken hugs and kisses. This was no joke. I was certain, absolutely without doubt, that Jari was going to rape me. I wished Mama would lock me in the closet again, hide me there, so I could be safe.

I managed a little hee-haw to placate Jari, then scurried off to my bedroom and had a panic attack.

I didn’t sleep that night. Even once the panic ended, I was afraid of what might happen if I slept and got caught unawares while Jari crept in. But I couldn’t stay awake forever.

I thought about telling Jukka. He would try to defend me, but tough as he was, he was no match for Jari. Jukka would end up in the hospital, maybe even dead. I couldn’t do that to him, and both Jari and Mama would take out their anger on me. I would be in a worse position than I was now. Once again I had two options: run away from home or kill Jari.

I mulled it over. I only had enough money to last for a few days. I would have to live on the street. Bullies would go back to having field days with the ugly disfigured kid again. I would starve, and eventually, someone else would get around to raping the defenseless street urchin. That wasn’t an option, so that left me with only one course of action.

I needed something to kill him with. Since I was kitten weak, I couldn’t cock his shotgun. He slept with it propped up next to the bed anyway. I needed poison or a weapon that he couldn’t take away from me before I could use it. I could stab him to death in his sleep. Hold the kitchen knife with a rag so only Mama’s fingerprints were on it, to keep me out of jail. But then Mama wouldn’t have her medicine. She would take it out on me. Maybe even ruin my other hand. Jukka be damned.

I needed a gun.

I searched the Internet, read gun laws, tried to figure out some way I could get one. I also needed ammo. Jari had a box of .12-gauge shells, so I should get a .12-gauge shotgun. Guns and ammo are hard to steal. Stores keep them locked up in display cases or behind the counter. I hadn’t learned to pick locks yet.

I hunkered down with the computer overnight. I found a gap in the law. A firearm over a hundred years old is no longer technically a weapon; it’s an antique. I checked antique auctions on the Internet. I found a piece-of-shit shotgun. A Crescent, made in 1904. It was beat to pieces, looked like somebody used it to drive nails. It was hammerless. I didn’t have to be strong enough to cock it. Opening bid, sixty euros. I had saved about a hundred euros from the money Jukka gave me.

Two sleepless days later, I went to the auction and got it for the opening bid. Nobody else wanted such a piece of trash. They were hesitant to sell it to me. I made up some song and dance about my grandpa wanting a shotgun for his birthday. The pricks knew my grandpa wouldn’t even try to fire the thing—it looked like it might explode—but they didn’t want it sitting in inventory forever either, so they sold it to me. I asked them to put it in a couple garbage bags. Most likely, the bus driver would call the police, and one way or another, I would be stopped by the cops about ten times before I could get home with it. So they hid it for me with a bag on each end and taped them together.

When I got home, I threw it in a junk pile in back—worn-out tires, stuff like that—then went out and bought a hacksaw and a short handsaw, and some oil. I didn’t have enough money for an electric carving knife, so I shoplifted one. When I returned, the house was empty. I laid my backpack on a tire, and the gun on the backpack, cut the butt down to a pistol grip, and sawed the barrels down just enough so that the gun fit in my backpack. It left me exhausted, but the lever to open the breech squeaked and so did the breech when I opened it to load it. I oiled them, and worked the lever and breech back and forth until they were almost silent. I put the gun in the backpack with my schoolbooks. No one would suspect it was there.

The following day, Jari took me on his afternoon run. His hand was brushing against my thigh and closer to my privates even more than usual. Time was short. It was now or never. He kept a box of shells in his glove compartment.

When he got out of his vehicle of the moment—an object of ridicule, a Lada, a dented Russian rust bucket—to sell some meth and heroin with shaking hands, I took two shells out of the glove box, slid my shotgun out of my backpack, and loaded it. I laid it down in the floor space between my seat and the door. Jari had his shotgun between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. I wondered if, when I killed him, the gun would blow apart and take off my good hand.

Jari pulled back out onto the road, and when his attention was diverted, I pulled out my shotgun. It was heavy, so I rested the barrels on his crotch and kept my fingers on the triggers.

I thought he might go for his own gun, but he just laughed. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m protecting myself from being victimized by a pedophile.”

He saw I was serious, and nervous, and might accidentally blow his balls off. “I’m not a pedophile. I’ve treated you not like a son, but like a friend. I’ve taken care of you and your mother. And you’re gonna pull some crazy stunt like this on me. Are you fucking crazy?”

I told the truth: “Yeah.”

He didn’t know what to do. He was king of the hill, and all of a sudden, a disabled teenage boy had a cannon in his crotch. He radiated bewilderment. “What now?”

“Drive over to Lintulahti, and park where they keep the rental vehicles, behind the gas station.”

Most of the vehicles were moving trucks. Parking between two of them made for zero visibility into the little Lada, and not a lot of people came and went anyway. It was just a few minutes away. We rode in silence. I could smell fear-sweat roll off him.

“Cock your shotgun, put the safety on, and put it on the backseat,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I might need it later. Empty your pockets and put everything in the glove box.” His dope was already there. He put in his fat cash roll with a rubber band around it—a lot of money—and then his wallet. He asked if he could have a smoke.

“No. Drive to your supplier’s place,” I said.

“You’re getting in way over your head,” he said.

“It’s my head, just drive.”

We went back up the hill to an apartment building on Vaasankatu. I didn’t even try to hide the guns. Just tucked the tactical shotgun in the crook of my bad arm and held the sawed-off in both hands, pointed at him, but just out of his reach, in case he tried to take it away from me. People in that neighborhood tend to not want to get involved.

He rang the buzzer, a voice answered, and Jari said, “It’s me.”

The front door unlocked. We took an elevator up. The apartment door was open for us when we got there. We went to the living room. A pretty woman in her twenties was smoking a joint and watching TV. She didn’t even bother to glance at us. “What’s up?” she asked.

Jari said, “We’re being ripped off by a child.”

She looked up and showed no emotion. “Put the guns down and I’ll let you live.”

I set the sawed-off at my feet. The tactical shotgun was actually lighter, despite the bells and whistles and big magazine. I flipped the safety off. An air rifle was propped against the wall, next to an open window. A box of pellets on the sill. It looked like a nice gun, was scoped and everything. “What’s that for?” I asked.

“I shoot pigeons when I’m bored.”

“Jari, use it to shoot her eye out.”

“You’re making a mistake,” she said.

“Your stash and cash, or your eye,” I answered, though it was a lie. I had already decided that she would track me down and kill me, probably torture me first. I had already decided to kill them both.

I pointed his shotgun at him. He looked at her and shrugged, as if to say, What can I do?

It was a powerful kind of air rifle that runs on nitro cylinders, not the pump-up kind. He stuck a pellet in it.

“If I give you my dope,” she said, “I’ll be killed for it. No one will believe this story. Don’t do this.”

“With just one eye left, and the possibility of Jari shooting out the other, you might decide to take your chances.” I aimed at Jari’s head. “Shoot,” I said.

She closed her eyes. He put the muzzle to her left eye and pulled the trigger. Her head slumped back against the couch. Jari checked her pulse. “She’s dead,” he said.

Damn. The projectile penetrated all the way into her brain cavity. I didn’t know a pellet gun could do that. “Reload it,” I said.

He was soaked with sweat, stunk, didn’t say a word, just stuck another pellet in it and propped it against the wall, where it was when we came in.

I told him to sit beside her on the couch. “Where is her dope and money?”

“I don’t know. She keeps it in another room. She only brings it out here so I can watch her weigh it.” He’s talking about her in the present tense. Reality hasn’t set in yet.

“Last chance,” I said.

Panic showed in his eyes, and a tear ran down and dripped off his nose.

“Lay on the floor, facedown, arms and legs spread eagle.”

“Please,” he said.

“Like you said, you’ve been good to me and Mama. I’m not going to kill you. Just stay put while I search the place.”

This calmed him a bit. It was difficult to hold two weapons, but I took the pellet gun and shot him in the temple with it. Motherfucker. I wished I could have killed him ten more times.

Now I had all the time in the world. I turned the place upside down. She hadn’t hidden anything well, but she was organized. All the drugs were in big freezer bags and clearly marked: heroin, cocaine, methedrine, marijuana, ecstasy. I also came up with three handguns.

Jari had taught me to drive. I took it all downstairs and put it in the Lada. Including her set of scales. My future had become clear.

I bagged it all up and took it home. Mama was on the nod. Had overdone it a bit. Her dope and rig were there on the table. I shot her up. She moaned. Her eyes closed. I shot her up again. And then once more, just to make sure. I brought everything inside while she was dying.

It was hard, but she was skinny. I dragged her to the bathroom and left her on the floor. I laid her on her stomach with her face down and neck over the shower drain. The electric carving knife went through her throat like butter and the blood flowed. No muss, no fuss.

I went through the IKEA online catalog and ordered a coffee table sort of like a coffin. The top opened and there was a lot of space inside. And I ordered two hundred kilos of lime, paid them a big delivery charge. And another tip for the guys from IKEA to assemble the coffee table in front of my throne. I can’t manage a hammer and nails, so I bought the local grocery out of Krazy Glue.

Mama went into the table, a piece at a time, each chunk covered with a generous portion of lime. I glued the top down with as much care as if I was handling nuclear waste. Mama finally got cured, and makes a nice footrest as well.

* * *

I bought myself a cool bicycle, and have a little route that I run around Kallio every day after school. No one picks on me because I have what they want, and a snub-nosed .357 Magnum further convinces them that there are plenty of other people they would rather bully.

 

This story was originally written in English.